Having an all-in-one setup is nice, but my brain keeps getting stuck in a loop trying to figure out the networking part.
My box has 6 NICS (+1 for IPMI but we won't count it). 2 nics are onboard & the other 4 are from an Intel card. I have NexentaStor set up in a VM providing NFS storage to ESXi. ESXi is installed on a 30GB SSD & I have NexentaStor's boot volume running off of another 30GB SSD which was added as a datastore to ESXi. This is working well so far.
What I'd like to do is have a private network between NexentaStor & ESXi for the NFS storage traffic. Do I actually need to use a NIC port for that, including cables & a switch, or can I just set that up logically between ESXi? I do have an 8 port managed switch that I plan to use for this box as well, so should I set up a private vlan for that traffic... say two trunked NICS? How is that best set up in ESXi? I thought it'd be a VMKernel network, but I need to be able to connect to it on the primary network for management.
My box has 6 NICS (+1 for IPMI but we won't count it). 2 nics are onboard & the other 4 are from an Intel card. I have NexentaStor set up in a VM providing NFS storage to ESXi. ESXi is installed on a 30GB SSD & I have NexentaStor's boot volume running off of another 30GB SSD which was added as a datastore to ESXi. This is working well so far.
What I'd like to do is have a private network between NexentaStor & ESXi for the NFS storage traffic. Do I actually need to use a NIC port for that, including cables & a switch, or can I just set that up logically between ESXi? I do have an 8 port managed switch that I plan to use for this box as well, so should I set up a private vlan for that traffic... say two trunked NICS? How is that best set up in ESXi? I thought it'd be a VMKernel network, but I need to be able to connect to it on the primary network for management.